This freaking blows me away.  I'm speechless (literally.)

I often hear people decrying government regulations, all this oversight intruding into business and keeping things from running smoothly, thereby upping the time/cost to produce goods, resulting in higher retail prices, which result in higher sales tax so we can pay for all the oversight...

Regulations do not exist in a vacuum, there isn't a room full of guys going "how can we stick it to businesses this week?"  Regulations exist for (generally) very good reasons.  For example, regulations that prevent people from dumping toxic waste in a river exist because duh, somebody dumped toxic waste in a river to the detriment of the health and well being of others.

Why am I on this particular toxic stream of consciousness?  Perhaps you recall the news stories recently about people who's pets died suddenly (or became very ill) after eating certain brands of pet food?  The trail has led to concentrated rice protein for animal consumption imported from China, which is contaminated with melamine.  Melamine is high in nitrogen, which makes it a useful component of fertilizer, but which also causes it to resemble protein when animal food contaminated with it is analyzed for protein content.  By powderizing melamine and mixing it with pet food, you get food that seems to be very rich in protein and which in turn means you can use lower-grade products that cost less to make the feed.

There are no regulations in China regarding melamine in pet food, and so, surprise surprise, most Chinese animal feed contains melamine.  Is it safe?  Or rather, how much is safe?  Don't know.  You'd have to pay for a study to determine that, and suppose the study found out that small amounts had deleterious effects over time?  Then you'd need to make regulations, and enforce them, and that would cost money (and impact your economy.)  Without any studies, people have been adding it to feed for the economic benefits, without any guidelines as to how much is too much.

From Filler in Animal Feed Is Open Secret in China (New York Times):
..."Many companies buy melamine scrap to make animal feed, such as fish feed," said Ji Denghui, general manager of the Fujian Sanming Dinghui Chemical Company, which sells melamine. "I don't know if there's a regulation on it. Probably not. No law or regulation says 'don't do it,' so everyone's doing it. The laws in China are like that, aren't they? If there's no accident, there won't be any regulation."...

When ingested, melamine (which is manufactured from coal) is apparently metabolized into various chemicals, one of which is ammonia.  It turns out that the symptoms of the American pets that became sick or died resemble ammonia poisoning.  If the person or persons responsible for the tainted rice protein had been a little less greedy and had used less melamine, maybe several pet owners wouldn't have lost their pets.

Melamine is NOT FOOD.  Therefore there is no nutritional reason for it to be there.  Your cat's renal system doesn't benefit from a feed manufacturer's bottom line.  But corporations are not motivated by civil responsibility, they are motivated by money.  Remember the infamous "Ford Pinto Memo"?  When Ford Motors decided that it would be cheaper to pay off lawsuits from families who's loved ones would die in exploding Pintos, than it would be to effect an eleven dollar repair to each Pinto?  Human or animal life is worth dick to some people (c.f. ULev article Human Wrongs from September of 2005, which also involved China).

This is why we need government oversight.  China has less food-safety oversight than we do, and the result is apparent:

From Filler in Animal Feed Is Open Secret in China (New York Times):
...The pet food case is also putting China’s agricultural exports under greater scrutiny because the country has had a terrible food safety record.

In recent years, for instance, China’s food safety scandals have involved everything from fake baby milk formulas and soy sauce made from human hair to instances where cuttlefish were soaked in calligraphy ink to improve their color and eels were fed contraceptive pills to make them grow long and slim...

I found out about this story from Man-Robot-Monster, which picked up on it from FlamingText.  I can think of no clever way to summarize this story as published in The Guardian, so I'll just offer up an excerpt:

A Chinese cosmetics company is using skin harvested from the corpses of executed convicts to develop beauty products for sale in Europe, an investigation by the Guardian has discovered...

Everybody listening? ...   more »